Celebrating its tenth year as Britain’s biggest heavy rock festival, Download
began in relentless rain and ended in glorious sunshine. Across the muddy
weekend it featured legendary figures from the 1970s and 1980s alongside
contemporary dance-rock acts including Prodigy & Chase and Status. But
the main event was an exclusive comeback show by the newly reformed Black
Sabbath, the Beatles of heavy metal, who can rightly claim to have spawned
most of the other bands at Download.

Heavy rock dissenters routinely dismiss the genre as a preposterous pantomime,
but one of the most endearing qualities of metal fans is that